much in a cloud of indeterminacy or secrecy, this narrative arouses in its readers a taste for mysteries that exist beyond the borders of what can be said and thought. The story pulses with hidden meanings and challenges the reader’s imagination to compensate for what is missing.13 In the silences, gaps, and missing vowels, biblical stories refrain from telling us what to think about each and every episode or character and subsequently invite us—or confront and cajole us—to supply our own meaning. As economical and austere as the narratives may be, there is untold treasure hiding here, gold mines under the dry desert soil.14
Thus the reader journeys through the course of biblical narrative, as through the course of life, a lot like Abraham does, mystified and bewildered but beguiled and allured by the unthinkable. Homer’s narrative, by contrast, is a paean to what can be expressed and thought. (The Greek philosophers, of course, extended this confidence even further.) He gives us a feeling that almost everything can be described and understood: the passions of gods and men; the delights of physical existence; the adventures and dangers of life; the fears, cruelties, and valor of human beings; and even the awful and ennobling reality of death. Whereas Homer seeks to diminish the mystery of life, the Bible extends the obscurity and envelopes us in that mystery, placing human beings within its vast canopy. The Bible abhors transparency.
In consequence, nephesh is a foil to transparency and a metaphor for the strange, opaque, twilight regions of the human person, for what is shadowy and slippery about human identity, for what only God can see (1 Sam. 16:7, 25:37; Ps. 44:22, 64:7). Though the soul is as intimate as one’s own breath, it remains a trace of the sacred Otherness that resides within us all, a mark of the unknown, as if it were engraved with a hieroglyph that stubbornly defeats decryption, like the tattoos on the body of Queequeg in Moby Dick (undecipherable “mystical treatises,” in Melville’s words).15
While much of modern thought has sought to shrink the scope of the unknown, I agree with Emerson that artists—he singles out preachers, poets, and musicians—pay homage to the enigmas of life. “After the most exhausting census has been made . . . this is that which the preacher and poet and the musician speak to: the region of destiny, of aspiration, of the unknown.”16 Perhaps intuitively, poets, preachers, and musicians build their works of art out of the dark materials of wonder and sublimity. They recognize the persistent presence of foreignness in the shadows of our being, even after the most careful and exhaustive census is performed. They are the best exegetes of the Bible.
The Mutability and Eccentricity of Nephesh: A Center of Surprise
Since the obscurity of the divine also extends to biblical characters, these souls are resistant to explanations that presume to offer absolute clarity. The shadows of the narratives cling to all of the characters like a spider’s web that has them—and us—in its clutch. One might say that the most intriguing characters of the Bible are the most entangled, the most scrambled and confused, the most human. There are so many layers to their mysterious souls because they undergo many surprising and dramatic changes, and they are never static. These characters advance and retreat, develop and regress, and are always subject to the wayward misfortunes and humiliations of life. Though freedom is a crucial attribute of these creatures, the narratives also show them bandied about and dragged along by events, leaves carried by the wind. No one epithet adequately summarizes these characters, because they have undergone too many changes for one designation to stick. Jacob (Ya’aqov) is a “heel-grabber,” but this label reveals nothing about the actual changes and revolutions in the course of his life. At the most, this label characterizes the genius of “Israel” (Jacob’s new name after wrestling with God) as a tradition of art and spirituality that confronts God with the wiles of a trickster, the combativeness of a wrestler, and the agony of a wounded warrior. It epitomizes the kind of wounded wisdom that is central to the painful history of Israel.
With an eye trained on the surprises, agonies, and eccentricities in biblical art, we learn something valuable about the soul: it is a “center of surprise,” in Robert Alter’s nice choice of words.17 Though awakened and infused with the divine breath of life, the soul of biblical characters is also made of the stuff of earth: dust, mud, and funk. What else can account for the imperfections and follies of people as seen in biblical narrative; what else explains their astonishing array of beauty and vileness? The highest aptitudes and possibilities of human beings are surely celebrated and extolled in the Bible, but rarely without digging into the lows, nadirs, and dregs of their lives. Rabbi Hillel caught this play of irony in the Bible in his aphorism, “My humiliation is my exaltation; my exaltation is my humiliation.”18 And the same irony appears in biblical narrative: the exaltation of biblical characters is menaced by failures, humiliations, and shameful deeds.
Indeed, almost all of the biblical patriarchs rise and fall, the way Skip James’s famous blues voice much later would rise on soaring, falsetto notes, then suddenly fall into hot and dirty wails.19 Though chosen and blessed by God, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob each has his moment of slithering in the dust, creeping as a matter of survival, getting by the fly way. Each experiences life as a refugee or slave, for example. Moses is no different; he survives a murder conspiracy, endures exile, and then dies in the middle of the desert. The ebbs and flows of David’s life may surpass them all, though. Robert Alter sizes him up well:
David, in the many decades through which we follow his career, is first a provincial ingénu and public charmer, then a shrewd political manipulator and a tough guerilla leader, later a helpless father floundering in the entanglements of his sons’ intrigues and rebellion, a refugee suddenly and astoundingly abasing himself before the scathing curses of Shimei, then a doddering old man bamboozled or at least directed by Bathsheeba and Nathan, and, in still another surprise on his very deathbed, an implacable seeker of vengeance against Joab and against the same Shimei whom he had ostensibly forgiven after the defeat of Absalom’s insurrection.20
David’s volatile life is given theatrical exuberance in the Bible. He changes costumes, masks, and performances like an itinerant actor, flipping and flying like a circus acrobat. It’s almost impossible to ascribe a single essence to his character because it is constructed of many personas and personalities: shepherd, soldier, king, poet, musician, lover, father, and through it all, a man with an extraordinary divine destiny. And even this latter role, with its related heroism, doesn’t exempt him from the tribulations of life: the violence and turmoil in his kingdom; the heartbreaking deaths of Jonathan, Absalom, and his son by Bathsheba; the iniquities and mutinies of his children; the humiliating experiences of life as a refugee; and so forth. In old age he ends up disheveled and doddering, after spending a life fraught with unrest and turmoil. We imagine him at this point with a dazed and confused look, reeling from the mercurial fluctuations in his life, from everything added and subtracted to his days on earth. His biographers charge his persona with the same friable ephemerality and floundering fallibility that any other human being has, showing us flashes of his eventful life in his sallies and sorties, his conniving and scheming, his victories and defeats. There is not one life story in David, but multiple histories, multiple acts, and multiple dramas.
In these episodes of David’s life the Bible is concerned with the whole arc of David’s life, not his individual psychology. Unlike a modern novel, the Bible generally does not give us access to the inner life of David’s soul. We may get glimpses of his psyche through his prayers—especially if we give him credit for the Psalms—but his innermost being remains opaque to everyone save God.21 His actions are often surprising and unpredictable for this exact reason: we are not privy to his motives and subjective consciousness. When he acts, we don’t know what to expect, such as when he weeps and fasts for his son while he is still alive, but when the son dies, he washes, changes his clothes, worships the Lord, and eats. His behavior provokes dismay and curiosity in his servants, as in the reader. We expect acts of penance and abstinence after his death, but his explanation is convincing and eloquent. “Now that he is dead, why should I fast?” David remarks. “Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Sam. 12:23). David’s whole life is made
